“Bronson” Movie Review -- Perseverance, we are told, is an admirable trait.

The man who will not give in, no matter how many forces are arrayed against him — even when the odds are insurmountable — is a hero.

Unless he’s not. Michael Peterson was a stupid violent criminal, sent to a British prison for seven years for robbing a post office. His net? About 26 pounds. That was in 1974. Thanks mostly to his refusal to

Bronson (R) Magnolia (93 min.) Directed by Nicolas Winding Refn. With Tom Hardy. Now playing in New York.

back down or reform, as well as his habit of attacking every guard he saw, he’s still there.

Indomitable? Definitely. Admirable? Hardly.

Of course, to hear Peterson tell it — as he sort of does, courtesy of Tom Hardy’s ferocious performance in the ultra-stylish drama-biopic “Bronson” — he was really just an artist trying to live his life to the fullest. It’s just that his art was violence, and his canvas was other people.

No one should be willing to buy that, but Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn, who made the astounding “Pusher” trilogy, takes that declaration as a jumping-off point, at least, and a defining structure. Refn’s film presents Peterson, who eventually adopts the name of his “alter-ego,” Charles Bronson, as a sort of avant-garde performer, standing in a baroque theater in full makeup, giving a lecture on his life’s work: hurting people.

This is then intercut with scenes from Peterson’s prison time, featuring brutal beatdowns (of, and by, guards) and scored to the lush strings of classical music. Some of it recalls Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange,” yet thematically Refn flips that film on its end. The question isn’t what happens when you brainwash a man into being nonviolent, but what happens when you can’t.

Hardy (whose last big job was “Wuthering Heights” on British TV) is phenomenal as Peterson (sometimes indecipherable, too). Bald, brutal and brooding, his emotions as quicksilver as the English sky, he’s no one you want to see walking toward you.

But neither is he ultimately quite as interesting as Kubrick’s anti-hero, Alex. The chief droog in “A Clockwork Orange” was sexy and funny; that film twisted expectations by showing evil with a schoolboy’s face. But Peterson is a bullet-headed, coarse-brained animal; although he’s fascinating, it’s only in the way a snake fascinates before it strikes.

Refn tells his story in a gripping, genre-breaking way, introducing broad theatricality and surreal animation. In some scenes, Peterson delivers monologues in a clown’s whiteface; in others, we’re in an asylum as mad as its patients.

Yet as exciting as it is — and however reluctantly impressed we may be by this man’s absolute stubborn intensity — ultimately Peterson seems less like a fully realized man than a dangerous, mad beast, butting his head into whatever comes into sight.

A final title card tells us that Peterson has, as of this date, spent 34 years in prison. Of those, 30 have been spent in solitary. We are, I’m sure, supposed to have conflicted and complicated feelings about that.

But I’m afraid the dominant one will be relief.

Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty@starledger.com or (212) 790-4435.